Features
FLORA: Our spectacular Piedmont
This week I was planning a Flora story inspired by the pressed-flower specimen in Jock Lauterer’s Great Aunt Myra Baldwin’s 1943 diary described in a recent “A Thousand Words.”
FLORA: Eulogy for Polk Place Persimmon
Flora has annually eulogized the university’s 200-plus-year-old “Polk Place Persimmon.”
FLORA: Spectacular wildflowers in the Piedmont
A friend visiting from the Carolina mountains inquired of some local folks about locations of spectacular wildflower displays here in the Piedmont.
A different kind of giving
Although she has been retired from teaching in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools for 20 years, Catharyne Jones Butler continues to give back to the community in new ways.
FLORA: ‘Curiously lurking amongst the grassy leaves’
Legendary English gardener and writer Vita Sackville-West described spiderwort as “… a plant I like very much, sometimes called the Trinity Flower, owing to its three petals of a rich violet, curiously lurking amongst the grassy leaves.”
FLORA: It’s all there
With three parted leaves like the traditional shamrock, the wood-sorrels are calling out to us these days from sunny and shady locations.
FLORA: Wild geraniums
Cool, moist interludes during this early warm spring provide optimal conditions for a lingering presence of our wildflowers.
FLORA: Lowly, lovely cinquefoil
It is so interesting to watch the unfolding of the new landscape slowly emerging around the N.C. Botanical Garden’s new building complex.
FLORA: Watch out for this one!
Well now, I had a wonderful, easy-to-grow, native wildflower groundcover all lined up for this week’s Flora when an awful, innocent-looking plant alien pushed it aside.
Police ReCYCLE bikes
It took Carrboro police two years to accumulate 59 bikes, and less than 20 minutes to get rid of them.
FLORA: Died and gone to heaven
It was the first weekend in April last year that I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when chancing upon carpets of the tiny little red-eyed, purple-petaled bluets carpeting the sacred ground of the Sparrow Cemetery out on Mt. Carmel Church Road.
FLORA: Tread gently among the trout lilies
More than four weeks ago Dave Otto spotted a trout lily in flower on Bolin Creek.
Singing Seuss
First-grader Gracie Kolat belts out a tune with the Seuss Singers as she helps celebrate a successful Read-a-thon at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School last Friday, the birthday of Seuss creator Theodor Geisel and Read Across America Day.
FLORA: What’s wrong with the red cedars?
This is the time in our changing seasons when we might become alarmed that some of our red cedar trees are diseased or otherwise sickly.
Photography exhibit explores spirit of Carrboro
It all stems from a simple question: What moves you?
